Category: Mobile software

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Over a month after both its Android as well as Windows Phone versions were taken down, the HTC Sense TV app is back on the Windows Phone Store.

If you aren’t already aware, the app allows owners of the HTC One (M8) to use their smartphone as a remote control for their TV. At the time the Sense TV app was discontinued, the company said that users will be prompted to download the Peel app, on which the former is based. However, that never happened. Read more »

Back in May a leaked report claimed HTC was gearing up to introduce ads to its BlinkFeed app, and today the Taiwanese company itself has confirmed this. Furthermore, the promotional content will start showing up in BlinkFeed today, at least for users in certain regions.

So if you have an HTC device with BlinkFeed on it and are currently in the US, UK, Germany, Taiwan, or China, expect to start seeing ads such as the one in the screenshot above very soon, if you haven’t already. Read more »

Following the lead of Facebook, its perpetual competitor in the social network space, Twitter has today announced it’s enabling autoplay for videos. This goes live today on iOS and the web, and it will come to Android soon through an update for Twitter’s app for Google’s platform.

This means exactly what you think it means. From now on, while scrolling through your timeline, videos will automatically start playing. This works with native videos, Vines, and animated GIFs. Read more »

We’ve known that Microsoft is working on bringing Cortana to iOS and Android since last month, but today we’ve received an actual release time frame from the software giant. At least for the Android version, that is.

According to Microsoft itself, we should expect to see a beta version of Cortana for Android hit the streets in July. No information has been shared about the iOS release at this time. Read more »

Google has updated its Maps application with a couple of new and interesting features as well as some bug fixes. You’ll be pleased to know that the app will now warn you when you are about to navigate to a place that will be closed at your time of arrival.

As clear from the screen-shot above, the app will also display the working hours of the establishment as well as your estimated time of arrival below the warning message. Read more »

Facebook has released a new mobile app today. It’s called Moments and it’s already available for iOS and Android, at least in the US. The idea behind it is simple. At many events such as weddings, but also smaller gatherings like nights out, many people take photos – but you don’t have an easy way to share these with the people who participated.

Moments privately syncs photos you and your friends have taken in the same place at the same time. It doesn’t make any of the images public on Facebook, but it does give you a way to easily give specific friends your photos from an event, while at the same time receiving theirs. So after using Moments you’ll all have all the captures you snapped together. Read more »

The information comes straight from Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, who revealed the new figure at an investor meeting. The discrepancy in the numbers (compared to the 1 billion installs on Android alone) obviously comes from the fact that not all the people who installed Facebook Messenger are using it on a monthly basis. Read more »

Google Slides for iOS and Android received a major update. The new version of the productivity app now supports Chromecast and AirPlay, thus making it easy for users to present on just about any screen with no wires.

Once you begin casting the presentation on a compatible device, the screen of your smartphone or tablet acts like a companion. Read more »

Your favorite ad blocker may soon land in Safari – both the iOS 9 and the Mac OS X El Capitan versions. The new functionality allows apps to give Safari rules about blocking cookies, images, other resources, pop-ups and other content.

This should enable everything from ad blocking to privacy add-ons to work natively on Apple gadgets. Read more »

Facebook Messenger for Android has entered into the exclusive 1 billion+ downloads club. The news was announced by David Marcus, who leads the company’s messaging business, in a Facebook post.

If you aren’t in the know, Messenger is the company’s third app to cross the milestone – the Facebook Android app did it last year, while WhatsApp did it this year. Also, Facebook and Google are the only two companies that have apps with more than 1 billion Google Play downloads – the latter’s Google Search, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube apps are part of the club. Read more »

If you found Mozilla’s OS efforts curious, though not quite enough to buy a Firefox phone or try flashing a ROM on an old Android, here’s a painless way to try out the HTML5-based OS. It’s called b2gdroid, a reference to Boot2Gecko, the basis of Firefox OS.

It’s a 65MB APK that puts a sort-of working, mostly complete implementation of the Firefox OS experience. Read more »

When Apple unveiled iOS 9 at its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, one of the new features that wasn’t detailed during the keynote was an app that the company claims makes it easy for you to switch from Android to iOS.